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September 28, 2013

Temperature and Precipitation in the 21st Century

New data visualizations from the NASA Center for Climate Simulation and NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio show how climate models — those used in the new report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — estimate how temperature and precipitation patterns could change throughout the 21st century.

For the IPCC’s Physical Science Basis and Summary for Policymakers reports, scientists referenced an international climate modeling effort to study how the Earth might respond to four different scenarios of how much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases would be emitted into the atmosphere throughout the 21st century.

That modeling effort, called the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5), includes dozens of climate models from institutions around the world, including from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.